Fml!!!

So this morning at about 12:15am I'm laying in bed watching TV. I hear my phone go off twice alerting me that I have received two new emails. I grab my phone and look at the emails. One of the emails says that the security questions on my Yahoo account have been changed, and the other one says that I have made a payment of $154 through my PayPal account.

I immediately jump out of bed and log into my Gmail account on my computer to take a closer look at these emails. Obviously the most important one is the PayPal one, so I log into my PayPal account (not clicking on any of the email links) to confirm that in fact a payment has been made.

I was able to successfully log in and someone did in fact make that unauthorized payment. I immediately changed my password and opened up a dispute for the payment. Next thing I know my Gtalk alerts me that I have a new email from PayPal (confirming the dispute), so I click on the pop-up to take me to my Gmail. To my surprise I am now logged out of Gmail and it's asking me for my password. I put my password in and it's telling me it's wrong.

F*ck!!! They have now compromised my Gmail account! I hurry up and try to do a password reset by having it send a link to my secondary email account which is my Yahoo account. well, remember that first email I got that said someone had changed the security questions? Yep, they compromised my Yahoo account as well.

Unfortunately, Google doesn't offer any type of technical support for Gmail so you're stuck having to fill out a form and hope you get your account back. At this point, whoever go into my account has already deleted my Gmail account. I'm still patiently waiting on Google to respond and I'm hoping they'll be able to restore my account.

Yes, I'm guilty of using the same password for a lot of my online accounts. It's very overwhelming when you have so many accounts that you have to track the passwords on. My password was over 10 characters long, used both uppercase and lowercase letters and a number. This was a HUGE wake up call showing me that this can happen to anyone even those of us that are considered being computer savvy.

I have already created a new Gmail account just in case they're no able to get my old one back. Oh well...live and learn I guess.

Staff MemberPremium Member

while the same password for every account is common, the one question i have is what kinds of sites are you going to?

it's not so much that it's the exact same pw for everything, but what sites you go to or where you happen to check your accounts. public library computers, school computers, etc? for your future use, i hope you don't get your accounts compromised again or anyone else for that matter.

Wow that's crazy. That guy was rolling through those things. I guess he really knew what he was doing. I have never had that problem but I will definitely have to keep this in mind when making passwords from now on. What did he buy?

I had something similar happen to me and I was locked out of my gmail account. I opened a dispute cause you can not speak with anyone. In the mean time, I saved my contacts to my phone and created a new gmail account and uploaded those contacts. Then maybe a week later, my gmail account was reinstated.

My lesson learned is I change my gmail account password every 1-2 months. No one will contact you from filing out the forms to gmail on line. All you can do is wait.